Follow the rules: It's schools that need an education

On March 30, students of Swami Vivekanada School, a privately-run institute in Nagavara, gathered outside the school gates to collect their hall tickets. They were told that the tickets were being signed. It was only after they were denied permission to write the exam that they realised, at a most crucial juncture in their lives, that their school was unrecognised. All their efforts over the last year had amounted to nothing.

The education system in the state - and the country — is governed by very strict laws. The Right to Education Act leaves no stone unturned in its quest for equality and transparency. Still, it manages to give private schools a great deal of freedom, trusting that they will do what is expected of them. Every unaided school, for instance, needs to publicly display details of capitation and donation within the fee structure. This needs to happen on their website and in the propspectus. How many schools actually do this?

They also need to unequivocally state the terms of admission and the board by which they have been recognised. Complete transparency is the bottom line.
Malpractice is rampant among schools in the city, but this has nothing to do with an absence of policy. It boils down to two things: schools shirking their responsibilities and a lack of political will to ensure that rules are implemented.

Rules are still flouted - the admission process is a classic example. Admissions are not supposed to start before April, but you always have cases of schools ending the process by January. The matter of recognition is a serious one and schools don’t receive simply because they don’t meet the criterial laid out by the RTE.

These rules have been put in place simply to make sure that there is no ambiguity in the processes of providing education — which is the keystone of our society. Schools require very clear guidelines in terms of what needs to be done and how, but unless these are followed with sincerity, we are never going to see any progress.

The state received a lot of flack over the medium of instruction, with schools that instructed in English doing so with Kannada-medium licenses. The matter was eventually sorted out by the Supreme Court, but policies cannot always be questioned in this way; there is usually a reason behind them.

The state is at liberty to decide if a certain medium of instruction has reached saturation point. Receiving sanctions has been made difficult because of this. Even opening a school, for instance, is dependent on a number of factors. The law says that two schools cannot exist within a one kilometer radius and those are norms we must respect.

Schools open and function without proper recognition because education has been singled out as a great area for profit-making. This is something I cannot agree with. In India, education has always been a matter of social good. Schools are welcome as long as those who run them do not do so on a profit or loss basis.

Why do I say this? Profit influences and transforms the very values that underly education. When institutions compete with each other, the end-game is about getting the best results. Children are going to find themselves caught in this endless rat race at such early stages in their lives. Instead of being a tool for creating positive change in society, human beings — children are transformed into enablers of profit. Education is reduced to a commodity.

I talk about not criticising the policies of the state, but this doesn't mean they are closed to questioning. Criticism is unnecessary, while constructive engagement can go a long way. In this regard, the state's education department has always been open to suggestions from schools across the state.

They have often reached out to schools, asking them to outline what they expect from the authorities that govern them. Policy-making is a two way street.
Institutions are given total freedom to decide how they want to run things as long as the process is transparent and fair. Why is this such an unreasonable expectation?

There is a lack of accountability as far as schools are concerned. This can be worked around if schools do take the initiative to form committees that comprise parents and the students themselves. The latter are the most important consumers of these services, but how many schools involve children in the decision-making process?

The current system of education leaves much to be desired, that is for sure. Still, this does not call for a revamping at the policy level. It comes down to the matter of implementation, accountability and an innate sense of duty, which most private schools simply don’t show. The chaos that has ensued with the PUC exams is an example of this.

We need a political setup which will rein in the unprecedented growth of education as an industry and bring us back to the idea laid out in the Constitution — where education cannot be divorced from charity and is geared completely toward social transformation, instead of being a system that throws children into a world of ruthless, unfettered ambition driven solely by the idea of making a profit.
(The writer is Fellow and Programme Head, Universalisation of Equitable Quality Education Programme at National Law School of India University)